Improving Magento with Ajax Add to Basket Functionality

Magento out of the box doesn’t have the best approach to adding products to your shopping basket, however we can improve this quite easily using a Magento plug-in called “AJAX Cart Pro” (http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/ajax-cart-pro.html). It features the ability to add products to your Magento shopping basket without reloading the web page, as it loads within an on-screen pop-up giving you the option to continue shopping or go to your basket. The look of your “Added to Basket” pop-up can be customised in your Magento theme using the standard xml/phtml template system approach.

Another good feature of this plug-in is how easy it is to control how appears on the front-end, as you can see from the options available in the screen-shot above, we can show a loading progress bar, change it’s image and even auto close the pop-up notification box.

We’ve recently implemented this on one of our client websites “Electric Point”, see it in action by adding products to your basket here: www.electricpoint.com.

As you can see, using this functionality on your Magento store can make the whole customer shopping experience much faster and easier, as we don’t have to reload the page and it lets the customer know straight away that the product is added, giving them the option to checkout or continue shopping on the website. This functionality is a must have feature for any Magento store user looking to increase their ROI.